Down To Earth

Editorial. Sunita Narain.
XXXI.III.XV

How
power can be cleaned

by Sunita
Narain

Coal is an
environmentalist’s bugbear. The use of coal
to generate energy is the key reason the world is
looking at a catastrophic future because of
climate change. Recognising this, global civil
society has given a rousing call for coal
divestment, asking companies, universities and
individuals to stop investment in coal thermal
power plants. They want coal to go, renewables to
be in. And in the interim, clean gas, also a
fossil fuel, to be used as a “bridge
fuel”. In this scenario any talk of
“cleaning” coal to make it less
damaging is untenable.

This will not work for
us in India. We have a huge energy deficit, with
millions of households without power for basic
lighting or cooking. We have to address access to
energy as much as the environmental problems of
unclean power. We need to push for
renewable—not because we can afford to do
without coal, but because this source of energy
provides us the option to leapfrog to
decentralised and off-grid power. But equally, and
perhaps even more important, is to clean coal
power so that it does not destroy the environment
and take human lives.

This is what my
colleagues at the Centre for Science and
Environment (CSE) have done. They have taken apart
- quite literally - the thermal power sector in
India and plant-by-plant looked at what is the
efficiency rate, the pollution load, the
management of waste and the compliance with
environmental standards. Their findings, published
in the report, Heat on Power: Green rating of
coal-based thermal power plants, concludes that
our plants are way behind the global best in terms
of performance.

More importantly, it
speaks of the dire crisis in the power sector in
the country, where the obsession is to build more
plants and not fix what is clearly so completely
broken—supply of affordable power to all. Of
the 47 plants surveyed—accounting for
roughly half the installed capacity in India in
2012—only 12 had efficiency higher than 36
per cent, which touches China’s average. The
Indian average, pulled down by dated technology
and poor resource management, was a low 33 per
cent.

Worse, the plant load
factor has been declining in the past few years,
going down to a low of 65 per cent in 2013-14, as
compared to 79 per cent in 2007-08. This clearly
speaks of the mismatch between demand and supply,
as state electricity companies struggle to buy
power, even cheap power. This then affects the CO2
emissions from the plants. India’s average
was 1.08 tonnes of CO2/MWh, 45 per cent higher
than the global best and 14 per cent higher than
China’s average. Clearly, a huge opportunity
for India is to improve efficiency and to replace
its existing stock of plants—not build new
ones—with best technology.

This is not the only
challenge. The fact is that power plants pollute
air, consume water and dump huge quantities of
waste, namely fly ash. Indian plants have a long
way to go to clean up this mess. This is not a
small matter. My colleagues have estimated that
this sector alone is responsible for 70 per cent
of the total freshwater withdrawal by all
industries; over 60 per cent of the particulate
matter emissions; 50 per cent of sulphur dioxide
emissions and more than 80 per cent of mercury
emissions. So, if we clean this sector, we make
huge gains in cleaning pollution from
India’s industrial sector.

Doing this requires
first setting standards that are stringent and
usher in best technology and management, and then
ensuring that monitoring is rigorous and
verifiable. CSE has found that most plants either
contract out pollution monitoring to third-party
laboratories or have set up online emission
monitoring systems. But in both cases data is poor
and systems unaudited. This is particularly
important because no pollution board has the
capacity (or authority) to shut down a power plant
for obvious reasons.

The biggest issue is
gainful use of fly ash since India’s coal is
of poor quality. For every tonne of coal burnt,
35-40 per cent is generated as waste. Just
consider the scale of this problem: over 40 per
cent land area of power plants is used to dump
ash. Over 1 billion tonnes of ash is lying unused
today and to this over 160 million tonnes are
added each year. Everything we have done till
date, including specifying the use of ash in
cement manufacturing and bricks, is not making a
dent in the gargantuan pile of
muck.

So a clean-up is
essential. But for this India’s power sector
must also come clean. The CSE project requires
companies to voluntarily share data. It was
India’s largest power generator, National
Thermal Power Corporation, which refused public
scrutiny. This will not build a cleaner future.
Ultimately, this is the real agenda for
reform.